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Pike not only rejected the concept of the immiscibility of races, he argued for the creation of a
hybrid racial mixture in which the indigenous component would usually predominate.
Although the ranting racist diatribes of Robert Knox, the moderation of Luke Owen Pike, even
the commentaries of Matthew Arnold, were the expression of strongly held opinions, none of them
had a solid basis of factual evidence. While the fierce argument was raging about whether races
were fixed and immiscible or could happily and successfully interbreed and blend, a few people
did begin to gather systematic scientific observations to inform the debate.
The first to do so on a significant scale was John Beddoe, a doctor who spent the best part of
his life travelling to every part of Britain recording the physical appearance of the natives, both
alive and dead. He was a classic case of the Victorian amateur scholar, amassing a huge amount of
data which, in sheer bulk alone, has never been surpassed. John Beddoe was born in 1826 in rural
Worcestershire, the second of eight children. Though his family was comfortably well off, John
was a sickly child and missed most of his formal education. Nevertheless he managed, through
family connections, to get a place at University College London to study medicine. He eventually
graduated, not in London but in Edinburgh, and after a spell in the Crimea set himself up in Bristol.
Building up his medical practice in the fashionable quarter of Clifton was difficult, especially as
he had to compete for patients with a resident pool of extremely competent and well-established
doctors. With time on his hands, he began to indulge his passion for observing and recording
people’s appearance.
First, he had to devise a reliable classification for the features he decided to concentrate on –
the colour of the hair and the colour of the eyes – exactly those features we use ourselves in the
first description of a stranger. He also wanted to be quite sure that he was looking at permanent
features, not something that would change from year to year. For this reason he rejected skin colour,
perhaps an obvious one to include, because he was worried that it might be influenced by exposure
to sunlight, which of course it is. He also decided against recording skin colour because there was
a theory doing the rounds that daily exposure to smoke and grime made city-dwellers darker and
darker as they got older, while their rural contemporaries remained fresh-faced and pale in
comparison.
John Beddoe was determined to break free from the generalizations that were so commonplace,
and still are, about regional differences in appearance. He disregarded the clichés of short, dark
Welshmen or muscular, redheaded Highlanders and set out to replace these prejudiced impressions
with real observations. He frequently discovered that what had been written about a place and its
people was completely at odds with reality, even when the source of the misleading reports would
normally have given no cause for doubt. For example, the Church of Scotland minister in Wick, a
town at the north-east tip of Scotland not far from John O’Groats, was obliged to compile a
statistical account of his parishioners, including their overall appearance. The minister described
his flock as ‘having for the most part dark brown or black hair, and dark complexions, remarkably
few having red or yellow hair’. But when Beddoe arrived, he found the complete opposite. Among
more than 300 individuals whose appearance he recorded, blonds and redheads were in the
majority.
How did Beddoe make his observations? You can imagine how this might get very complicated
– are those eyes green or hazel? Is that hair light brunette or dark blond? But Beddoe needed
something much simpler, and easy to record – we will see why in a moment – and he spent several